The Falcons senior setter, tracking the ball in the air, elevates off the ground with her hands skyrocketed.

“One,” shouts Katelyn Cuff, middle blocker.

She plants her feet on the hardwood, eyeballing the volleyball as it springs off Chandler’s fingertips.

Cuff leaps in one direction. The ball fades another. Adjusting mid-air, she swings, grazing only a portion of the ball. No big deal. A simple miscommunication in practice can easily be fixed.

After all, Chandler had been sidelined for two weeks with a concussion she sustained from a collision with Cuff against Poway. Rust and rocky chemistry are expected.

During her absence, Erin Dobson stepped in. The senior backup setter directed Torrey Pines through four conference matches and the Santa Barbara Tournament of Champions where the Falcons finished fourth, losing to Archbishop Mitty and Corona Del Mar.

The losses dropped the Falcons, who had been ranked No. 1 in the nation to start the season, to 25-4 with CIF San Diego Section playoffs quickly approaching.

Chandler was back, though. And the pounding headaches and nausea that accompanied her concussion were gone. Cleared to resume, the Pepperdine commit returned to the court — restriction-free — Nov. 5.

Paranoia is there, too. When Cuff lands from the broken play during middle drills, a frightened and frustrated Chandler reacts.

“You’re too close,” she screams at Cuff, leery of another collision with the Colorado-bound middle blocker.

“What are you talking about?” Cuff responds.

Her teammates, surrounding the two players on the court, are puzzled. Cuff is nowhere near Chandler — at least not close enough to harm her.

Matters worsened. An identical situation occurs in practice later that day. Again, the volleyball was set in one direction while Cuff jumped the other.

This time, the miscommunication triggers tears from Chandler, who grows increasingly frustrated and emotional as practice progresses. She isn’t pleased with her performance, and it seems she and Cuff simply can’t connect on a play they’ve run hundreds of times.

“I made the mistake of saying, ‘I thought she was going to run over me,’ ” Chandler recalls, giggling.

Cuff added: “I think I was just afraid of making contact with her again and leading to another concussion or another injury and she was afraid of making contact with me.”

Coach Brennan Dean, witnessing a problem developing before his eyes, addressed his star players in private on the sidelines.

“We needed to come together, talk, get a quick cry in if they needed to, hug it out there and get back out there on the court and just keep moving forward,” Dean said.

It was crucial. The section playoffs were five days away. And if Torrey Pines was going to defend its 2011 Division I championship, Dean needed to pick up the pieces and reconfigure a fragile Chandler.

Convincing her that the collision was a freak occurrence and that she would regain her form within a few days was essential, particularly because Chandler held so much responsibility.

As setter, she facilitated the entry pass between the back row and the hitters. She put teammates in the right places, decided who received the volleyball, when to deliver the ball and blocked the right side attack.

“The first few practices I freaked out. I knew I wasn’t playing well,” Chandler said. “I got in the gym for private workouts to get as many reps setting the ball as I could and I worked on my cardio and conditioning so that I could be fit to play well. I think I kind of went crazy on myself.”

During Santa Barbara and the matches following, Dobson and the hitters adjusted and tweaked their game to accommodate each other — a steep learning curve considering the short amount of time to prepare.

The challenge Torrey Pines faced now was redeveloping rapport with Chandler at the forefront again. Getting her comfortable, on the same page with her front line again because they had recently gotten used to Dobson setting.

“It’s a whole new process again,” said sophomore outside hitter Savannah Rennie. “Even a week off with a setter is a lot, so it started off as shaking the rust from everyone with timing, connection and chemistry. It’s like a whole new process in a sense, but since we played with Ryann plenty before, it wasn’t so tough.”

Torrey Pines was undoubtedly the favorite in the playoffs. The Falcons swept through league play undefeated, dropping only four sets in 10 total matches. However, the Falcons had traveled down this road before — expecting to easily defeat teams because of the amount of talent at their disposal.

Leery of the possibility of an upset, Dean issued a warning to his team: opponents were targeting them, looking to knock off the defending champions.

“Don’t look past them. They’re out to get us,” Dean reminded his team.

“The teams that we’ve seen before will come back stronger than they were before. They’re hunting us. We have to hunt them.”

Behind Chandler, who returned to the court for the first round of the playoffs after a three-week absence from competition, Torrey Pines tackled each challenge — San Diego High, Carlsbad, Scripps Ranch and Poway — to claim consecutive CIF Section championships.

During that stretch, Chandler regained her footing and reestablished herself as the orchestrator on the court. Ripping and running back and forth, Chandler scooped up passes and positioned them in locations her hitters slammed with ease.

“She needed a few practices,” Dean said.

“Ryann is an absolutely phenomenal athlete, so I knew it would only take her a couple of days to get her touch back and get back to the level she played at before the concussion.”

Hoisting hardware from the Division I finals match achieved another team goal on Dean’s list. However, with a fully healthy roster and confidence brimming, Torrey Pines eyed another one — a CIF state championship.

When asked how the team celebrated, outside hitter Reilly Buechler responded, “I’m not sure if the others celebrated, but I didn’t really celebrate much. It’s a big deal, but not that big of a deal,” Buechler said smiling.

“We’re hungry for state.”

Without that moment between Cuff, Chandler and Dean, perhaps Torrey Pines’ season-ending stretch could have yielded different results, ultimately derailing their hopes for a push through state playoffs.

“If we let it go and it went another day and another day it could have manifested itself into an unappealing situation with hypersensitivity and overcautiousness,” Dean said.

“It would have probably taken me a week to get back to where I wanted to be, setting us back instead of having that one conversation and solving it right then and there.”